A vaccination campaign for Yellow fever is planned to begin in Ifelodun local government area of Kwara by September 30 to prevent further spread of infection.Ifelodun is site where a girl in the community of Oke Owa is reported yo have contracted Yellow fever on September 12.

Surrounding local government areas will also be covered in the vaccination campaign, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control said Monday. The case of Yellow fever was diagnosed and Lagos University Teaching Hospital and confirmed at the Institut Pasteur, Dakar, Senegal.

Health Minister Isaac Adewole has submitted the weekly report of the state of the Nation’s public health to the Federal Executive Council. He told statehouse correspondents at the end of the weekly FEC meeting in Abuja that the ministry was tracking four major diseases out breaks. “Council received the weekly report on the state of public health in Nigeria and we did inform council about four major outbreaks that we are currently tracking. “One is Lassa Fever and we are quite happy that there is a major decline in a number of reported cases. We have also not reported any deaths in the last two weeks but we still have two cases reported from Edo last week.

The Federal Government has directed all federal medical facilities and primary health care centres to treat cases of meningitis free of charge. Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole disclosed this in a statement saying that the outbreak of cerebral spinal meningitis since November 2016 had killed 328 persons.

He said Nigerians especially residents of Katsina, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto, Niger, Zamfara and Jigawa states should seek early attention, when discomforted with symptoms of Cerebrospinal Meningitis (CSM). He also urged them to avoid clogging together in unventilated and over-crowded rooms.

The Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, has said that Zamfara State with 24 state hospitals has only 23 doctors managing these health institutions. This, the minister noted, had been negatively affecting the health care delivery in the state.

He, therefore, argued that state governments need to enter into agreements with the Federal Government so that doctors working in federal establishments across the country could be deployed in state hospitals to assist.

The Joint Health Sector Union, JOHESU, has insisted on going on strike in spite of the Minister of Health’s plea with the association not to do so. The strike commenced in the early hours of Thursday, the union, whose membership includes other hospital workers apart from doctors, said.

The strike is coming a few days after the National Association of Resident Doctors called off its ten days national industrial action that crippled health activities at both secondary and tertiary health institutions

Few new antibiotics currently in the pipeline cannot combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance, a World Health Organisation (WHO) report has said. “Most of the drugs currently in the clinical pipeline are modifications of existing classes of antibiotics and are only short-term solutions. “Antimicrobial resistance is a global health emergency that will seriously jeopardise progress in modern medicine,” WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom, said in a statement on Thursday in New York.

“The report found very few potential treatment options for those antibiotic-resistant infections identified by WHO as posing the greatest threat to health, including drug-resistant tuberculosis which kills around 250,000 people each year.

The Chief of Surgery, Lagoon Hospitals, Dr Jimi Coker, has said that a third of patients that travel abroad for medical services, especially in cases of emergency, die in transit.

Coker, who spoke on the impact of medical tourism on the country during a panel discussion at the Healthcare Stakeholders Conference 2017 in Lagos, said it was high time Nigerians looked inward for their medical needs.